The New York pitch wasn't great. The outfield was probably worse, tbh. You can understand getting a pitch wrong when you're making a drop-in halfway around the world, but not being able to produce a pristine outfield with six months to work with is a little mystifying.
That said though, I think people are being a bit dramatic. The average baseball game has one home run per match. One. Americans are used to seeing bat and ball sports where the ball isn't flying into the stands every five minutes. In fact, I'd say T20 matches where that happens are probably not going to be a good advertisement for the game from an American point of view because it will just reinforce what they already think about cricket - it's baseball for people who can't baseball good. In American sports lore, the ability to hit a home run is seen as the hardest skill in ALL of sports. Introducing a game where ball is hit out of the park every 10 deliveries is going to inevitably make cricket look like baseball on easy mode.
The real problem is having the game on at the same time as Judge Judy and Sesame Street
That said though, I think people are being a bit dramatic. The average baseball game has one home run per match. One. Americans are used to seeing bat and ball sports where the ball isn't flying into the stands every five minutes. In fact, I'd say T20 matches where that happens are probably not going to be a good advertisement for the game from an American point of view because it will just reinforce what they already think about cricket - it's baseball for people who can't baseball good. In American sports lore, the ability to hit a home run is seen as the hardest skill in ALL of sports. Introducing a game where ball is hit out of the park every 10 deliveries is going to inevitably make cricket look like baseball on easy mode.
The real problem is having the game on at the same time as Judge Judy and Sesame Street